It’s a familiar modern fable – and a rather pretty one. Somewhere out there in suburbia there are thousands, maybe millions, of women reinventing themselves as domestic goddesses. The admen even have a name for it: “keeping up with Bree” (in homage to the most Stepfordesque creation of the TV series Desperate Housewives). Britain’s Brees worship Nigella, so the story goes, and they’ll be counting the days to the publication of her first unauthorised biography on 5 September.
These women use Cath Kidston peg bags and ironing-board covers, wear head-to-toe Boden and have goat’s cheese and organic vegetables delivered with their weekly online shop. They quit their high-powered City careers when they had children because they realised that the good old 1950s way of life is so much better for them and for their children. And they love baking cakes. There is just one problem. These women do not exist. Believe me, if they did, I would know them. As the mother of a toddler, I go to playgroup at least twice a week and the park at least twice a day. I am the sort of nosy person who questions other parents at supermarket checkouts. I meet dozens of mothers and hear about scores more. I know of maybe a hundred so-called stay-at-home mothers: yes, some of them own lavender linen water, but not one would refer to herself as a “housewife”, a “new housewife” or, God forbid, a domestic goddess.
Full-time mothers exist, although not in the numbers that we are led to believe. Seven in ten mothers work, either full-time or part-time. What I do know for sure is that only the tiniest, most negligible fraction of the three in ten who are full-time mothers have time to make their own bed, let alone master pastry from scratch.
In my experience, women at home full-time fall into two categories. The first are stay-at-home mothers who actively choose not to work and are completely happy with that, mostly because their husband earns a large amount of money. Yet not even these women do domestic goddess things: they have cleaners and nannies for that. For obvious reasons, this group, as my completely unscientific playgroup straw poll suggests, comprises a teeny minority of women.
The second category is far more numerous: women who have made a difficult decision not to work, one they are not entirely happy with, a decision they feel was made for them. They love being full-time mothers and relish the relationship they have with their children, but they hate not having their own money and they wonder what will happen in two years, in five years, in ten years, when they want to go back to work. Most women in this category say they would work if there was worthwhile work that you could do for a day or two a week (and some are even inventing this kind of work for themselves).
It is hard to talk about this without appearing to disrespect the work of full-time mothers. The reality, though, is that I know of not a single stay-at-home mother, however fulfilled, in a world where all women are educated and raised with the expectation of having a salaried working life (as they were not in the 1950s), who would not want to do a few hours of paid work a week in the adult world – but only if it was on her terms, and so little work is.
There is another, slightly more shaming, reason I know that no real “new” housewives exist. I know because I half-heartedly (and extremely unsuccessfully) play at being one myself occasionally, and I have discovered to my cost that not only is it physically impossible to keep up, but it also makes you extremely unpopular. Housewifely traits are now roundly detested by other women.
Recently I turned up for what the Americans call a “toddler play-date” at the house of a mother-of-three with a still-warm orange cake I had baked over breakfast. As I handed it over, my friend looked at first suspicious and then openly annoyed. Her expression soon shifted into sympathetic concern. I saw the question forming in her mind. Did I have some kind of extended post-natal depression that was giving me obsessive-compulsive tendencies?
Nigella herself knows this only too well and she is always trying to explain in interviews that she never meant the domestic goddess thing to be taken seriously: it was all a joke between her and her first husband, John Diamond. Her domestic goddess book was not supposed to be about one-upmanship, shackling yourself to the kitchen or going back to the 1950s. It was supposed to be about an attractive kitsch aesthetic that we would all love to buy into for a few moments of the day. The whole point was to give out an amusing illusion of being an old-fashioned lady housewife while incurring absolutely none of the hassle, and with your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.
Unfortunately, it has all been taken rather too seriously. Broadsheet newspapers especially have identified it as a “trend” which is inspiring women to swap the boardroom for jam-making. The ironic thing is that the women who have pioneered this aesthetic – Nigella herself, the home fragrance advocate Jo Malone and, of course, the interiors guru Cath Kidston – are all super-duper full-time businesswomen marketing a million-selling brand. They are less Bree Van De Kamp, more Donald Trump. The idea they are selling – effortless domesticity – is the very opposite of what their executive lives are made up of. Part of the Nigella fantasy is that she spends all her time painting her toenails and having midnight feasts in bed. Even a cursory glance at her books shows that she doesn’t. She depicts herself as a workaholic: she employs an army of home economists and works on her recipes into the night like a crazed academic – that is, when she is not in the television studio.
It is time we acknowledged that the 1950s housewife’s is not a way of life that is returning, but a knowing, almost sarcastic pose to which some women turn for occasional escapism. This is something I am very familiar with: yes, there is something comforting about making a perfect meal, keeping your home spick and span, and pretending for two seconds that you are 50 million times more subservient than you really are. The reason these things are attractive – and the reason we keep buying the Nigella books and the flowery aprons – is because they are the complete opposite of what our real lives are like: hassled, half-baked and frazzled, full of cross words, unmade beds and ready-meals.
By focusing on the pretty picture and believing it to be true, we are obscuring the truth about why some women who want to work don’t do so: there is nothing out there for them that allows them to earn decent money during reasonable hours. Today’s housewives are not desperate, they are just reluctant. They make the best of being at home not because it is the life they actively choose, but because there are no alternatives. And there is not much that’s divine about that sort of domesticity.
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